Ode to the Dogs of Southern France

I love dogs and I love southern France and that the two come together everyday when I am in the Dordogne is an eternal source of joy.

Like French people, French dogs have a strong sense of public decorum and courtesy. The French are polite—saying bonjour and au revoir whenever entering and exiting a store or café and respecting personal space in public while making public life colorful, witty, and engaging. Dogs are raised to behave similarly. They meet and greet, they come and go in cafes, they stop to say hello but they respect personal space at the same time.

In Sarlat there are many dogs who are as free as local humans to wander about town. They have their circuit, their terrain, and their expected meeting points. In cafes and restaurants, many dogs are as regular as the regulars and add to the richness. I am always amazed that they don’t beg, except for polite attention.

Here is a photo essay, a tribute to the dogs of southern France, who make day-to-day life an even greater pleasure in this golden land of caves, castles, and croissants.

Vivent les chiens!

November in Sarlat

There's a lot of black in town these days.

Toussaint, All Saints Day, kicked the month off as people dressed in black honored their deceased and filled the cemetery with colorful flowers.

Funerals too seem on the increase in November, maybe only because there are fewer weddings this time of year in Saint Sacerdos cathedral to distract from this heavier rite of passage in the same space.

November is the month of Sarlat’s annual international film festival. For a few days the small town is flooded by celebrities, filmmakers, and film students from across France. They all wear black.

But perhaps most enticing, November is the time of year that the black winter truffle will most likely appear. If it does, the truffle markets will open, the high-end one on Wednesdays and the standard one on Saturdays. What is curious is that, while one would think the dark celebrity of these affairs would be the tuber itself, the buyers out-compete the truffle in chic black attire, especially at the Wednesday market. Buttery black leather jackets, black brushed wool trousers, black cashmere sweaters and scarves. On the periphery of the hubbub are chic monotone dressers with black phones to their ears, communicating bids from far away clients, probably dressed in yacht-sailor’s blue and white, to a seller, who is dressed in the colors of the forest. Whatever their role, everyone wants to get into or stay in the black.

This year, word is, truffles are late. The arrival of the black truffle is heading towards December. One member of Café Oc, the Occitan conversation circle that meets once a month in Sarlat, told me not to worry, that the best truffles are those that peak in February. She advised waiting and offered her favorite recipe with truffles, the simple canapé: thin slices of the truffle atop fresh slices of rustic bread spread with butter and hit with sea salt. She said that paired with a glass of brut champagne made it perfection. I noticed she rarely wore black and almost always bright, saturated, and vibrant pink.